The present invention relates to computerized accounting systems and to reporting sub-systems therein.
Most modern firms use computers to monitor their financial operations. These firms generate computerized records that represent various transactions that the firm performs during the course of its operation. For example, banks typically store electronic records representing various loans that they manage and securities that they buy and sell. For large firms, there may be several million electronic records generated per year during the ordinary course of the firms' operations. These computer systems also may perform financial analysis and reporting functions to support internal accounting operations and the like.
In one reporting process, a computer system may generate financial statements from its transaction records. A variety of financial statements conventionally are prepared in accounting, such as balance sheet statements, profit/loss statements, a variety of notes and internal reports. Known computer systems require an operator to assign a transaction to a general ledger account at the time that the transaction is “posted,” e.g., when the posting document representing the transaction is created and stored in the computer system. Financial statement are directly based on these general ledger accounts. In this manner, a transaction's financial statement assignment is directly linked to the transaction record itself. When the time comes for the computer system to generate financial statements, the computer system assembles the financial statements using the hard coded assignments present in the transaction records.
The hard coding of financial statement assignments is cumbersome and inflexible. Some companies experience changes in their structure or legal type (e.g., from a bank to a capitalized company), which can cause the form and format of their reporting structures to change. Although the key figures of the postings themselves would remain correct, the financial statement assignments would become obsolete. Changes in the legal type or in the country where a firm is located also may affect the reporting of their business partners. It is very common to report e.g. which portion of the receivables is from banks or non-banks, which portion is from domestic and from foreign business partners. In such a case additional postings have to be made in order to reflect the change of country of a business partner. Known systems support only in rare cases the creation of mass postings. Accordingly, manual postings often are required. The applicant perceives a need in the art for an automated accounting and reporting system that provides flexible assignments between stored accounting records and financial statements prepared therefrom.